Ideas & Resources for Struggling Learners: Ages 11-13

Learning Benefits

Hover over each Learning Benefit below for a detailed explanation.

Literacy

Reading Comprehension

Middle school is a crucial time to engage your child in learning. It is often during these years that children are either ignited by or turned off to school. If your child struggles to learn, problem solve together and get a plan in place to allow success (and confidence!) to build. Support your child outside of school and find ways to extend or enhance what he’s doing at school.

Choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) stories: To help make reading exciting, introduce your child to CYOA books. There are books with many levels (e.g., The Haunted House vs The Abominable Snowman, both by RA Montgomery). Or try out a graphic novel CYOA like Meanwhile by Jason Shina for more visual learners (and those wanting less text). Some fun online variations:

Tikatok: Online publishing program that will walk your child through story creation to story completion. Lots of support for reluctant writers, but infinite creative possibilities as well. Free to publish online, but adding sound or purchasing a hard copy is fee-based.

Metacognition practice: Learning to use thinking tools and inference is a vital skill at this age. Struggling learners often have difficulty evaluating their strategies or thinking about their thinking (metacognition). One way to practice this is with cloze activities (deleted words from a passage that the reader fills in by drawing on their knowledge of context and grammar). They have to use context cues, schema, inference (all thinking tools) to fill in the blanks that the passage makes sense. Having your child explain her choice is another metacognitive task. With Learn Click, you can create cloze activities easily for your child. There are examples on the site, so begin there. Once your child gets more skilled, have her create them for you!